FOR NOW

Made to follow the steps of a dance,

He held hands with his ancestors,

his new friends, his family members,

cousins, relations by marriage, some of them look right through me,

they're strangers really,

there's at first a comfort in the discomfort,

I resort to shame over not speaking the language well,

I failed to study,

He falls into a trance of sorts,

dancing in a circle,

reminding him of immortality,

and the phases of uncertainty

that comprise a life.

He does not know the steps,

they were taught to him in Greek school,

he was never a patriot,

his feet sluggish and filled with a chronic lethargy of sorts,

follow along and find the rhythm pulse of the song,

they are like a tide in a perpetual rhythm,

a sort of awakening speckles his eyes,

which in keeping with the movement of the room,

now trace familiar smiles into a sense of connection,

he doubts with an iron conjecture,

they don't love me, they don't know me he thinks,

how could automatic love be genuine?

They were my family I spent more than a few decades without seeing them over my life,

for a span of some time, I saw them regularly every two or three years for part of a summer,

I learned the dance better,

I fall behind always, always out of place.

I don't feel loved,

I feel a certain abandonment of sorts.

I must learn the dance,

the dance is the way back out of the labyrinth.

I have a rich culture, but I cannot feel anything,

For years the steps of the dance gradually restricted my movements, made me self conscious,

my body became a prison,

love rendered me to tears,

I understood that there were different kinds of love,

but it was connection I was afraid of,

what if one of them dies,

what then?

I would be a mess.

I cannot love,

Instead I will learn the steps of the dance,

that will do for love,

for now.

Poem and image © 2016 Peter Kaleb Theodoropoulos aka Rockwell Wilder